We conceived straight away at the start of 2023 in what felt like a miracle. I know they say that the chances of getting pregnant so quickly are so slim, so we hadn’t really built our hopes up to be anything. When we saw the positive test we were over the moon.
It’s amazing how quickly you can fall in love with someone you’ve never met and look forward so much to the moment you get to meet them. As much as you try not to get carried away with things you start planning out what life will look like: thinking of names, working out when you’ll be on maternity leave, looking forward to life in a busy home.
We’d done everything by the book, even calling the midwives ahead of my booking appointment to see if I needed to take increased folic acid because of history in my family. We told our parents and a few friends, but the old wives saying about not sharing your news until you’re past the 12 week point stopped us from sharing our news more widely.
At my 8 week booking appointment with my midwife that was when I first noticed some spotting. I mentioned it straight away to my midwife who reassured me that some spotting is completely normal and it was probably nothing to worry about. Over the next 24 hours the bleeding increased and I ended up taking myself to A&E to get checked over as it was out of hours for EPAU and I needed reassurance that everything with my baby was fine.
I was checked over and examined by a consultant who tried to reassure us by explaining that I was experiencing a threatened miscarriage but that it is quite common and doesn’t necessarily mean something was wrong. While we were there, they booked us in for a reassurance scan with the EPAU. With the instructions to rest, we went back home and counted down the hours to the scan to know everything was ok.
At our scan, they found a healthy 8 week baby with a strong heartbeat and told us that now they’d found a heartbeat it was very uncommon for the pregnancy not to progress. They explained that it can be completely normal to continue with bleeding throughout but that the pregnancy was healthy and viable. It was the reassurance we needed and for a few hours it put our minds at rest. I think the statistics we were given were that a healthy heartbeat at 8 weeks meant there was a 98% survival rate which gave us some reassurance while we were there but then just set anxiety at an all time high after we’d left because I just couldn’t shake the feeling something wasn’t right.
Over the course of the weekend, the bleeding got worse and my anxiety grew. We called the EPAU on Monday to be told they couldn’t see us until a week after our last appointment so we needed to monitor things until then. Things continued to get worse and I started passing clots the size of my hand on the Tuesday, I remember knowing without needing to be told that it was all over.
In the short drive from home to the hospital I was in so much pain and I bled so much that I can remember seeing a puddle of blood on the A&E chair after I got up. Unfortunately by the time we were taken through A&E, the EPAU was closed for the day and I had to wait until the following day to have a scan to confirm what we realistically already knew. Having to hear the words ‘I’m sorry, there’s no longer a baby’ is an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. We will never 100% know where I lost our baby, but I think they were lost in an A&E toilet when I couldn’t bear the thought of fishing them and the clots out – a choice that will forever haunt me.
I was kept in overnight to make sure that they could scan me first thing in the morning. I barely slept at all that night, I was woken up by the sound of crying babies from the labour ward next door.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the date of that Tuesday – the day it felt like the ground was taken beneath me, and that everything I had wanted, hoped and prayed for, and loved from the moment we found out was gone. I was left feeling empty. Despite being surrounded with loved ones offering support in those early days, I’ve never felt as lonely or isolated as I did after I lost my baby. I felt lost in my own home and in my own life. I felt like I was a shell of a person going through the motions of life and living but walking through it all feeling completely numb and empty with no choice but to drag myself back to some form of normality because it was the only option.
We asked our parents to share with our family what we had been through and I asked my employer to share with everyone at work. We didn’t want there to be a big secret in the family that we had to keep to ourselves, we wanted to be able to be completely honest and open around family. I couldn’t face the idea of going back to work and have people ask if I felt better – losing a baby isn’t something you can feel better from – and the only way of knowing that people might understand was if they knew why I’d be off for a while.
Although having other people share the news for us made it easier for us to not have to explain to people who didn’t know we were pregnant, it has made me question why we stick to the 12 week rule to share our news – we’ve found it better knowing that everyone knows what we’ve experienced so why didn’t we tell them that we were pregnant sooner? I don’t know what we will do when we hopefully get pregnant again, but it has made me question the rules that society puts in place on when you should share pregnancy news.
A few months after our loss I had my first appointment with a counsellor as I’d really struggled with the grief of what we’d experienced. At the end of the session the she said to me that it’s okay to grieve properly because it’s important to remember that I was and always will be that baby’s mum. Hearing those words, that recognition, that I was that baby’s mum was the start of me feeling like I could begin to heal.
Being part of the 1 in 4 statistic of miscarriage is the worst place to find yourself, and unfortunately I don’t think we will ever be able to shake the statistics that we had been told to reassure us but that made us feel worse in the darkest pits of grief – 1 in 50. I know there are plenty more people out there in the same boat as us and it’s just so heart breaking to know that because so many people – usually the people who haven’t experienced it for themselves from what we’ve found – believe that it’s a taboo subject, it makes it so much harder; so much more isolating; so much more lonely of an experience to go through.
Since being honest and open about my miscarriage I have had so many people that I know reach out and say that they’ve been through a miscarriage too and hearing me speak about it has helped them to heal. It needs to be a subject we talk about without being made to feel guilty for our grief, and without being made to feel shame because it makes someone who hasn’t experienced it feel uncomfortable. I’ll always speak up to help those people who have experienced it to heal.
I hope our story can bring some support to others who find themselves in the same position as us and help stop even just one person from feeling as alone as we felt.